Don't be Putin's useful idiot

In the Kremlin’s narrative, America’s inability to consider Russia’s national interests and traditional sensitivities— under Republican and Democratic administrations alike — is the problem. As soon as these deficiencies are corrected, presumably by Trump, Putin will deliver a more accommodating Russia, which will be ready to “work fast to repair relations with Washington,” as Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov recently put it.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Putin is the most ideological Russian leader since Stalin, and his foreign policy is profoundly influenced by unshakable convictions about Russia’s destiny, its relations with the West and his own historic mission.

An ardent Soviet patriot, Putin has called the end of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century” — and he absolutely believes it. He has dedicated his life to correcting what he sees as a monstrously unjust turn of events, caused, in his eyes, by the West. His overarching agenda is to recover geopolitical assets lost in the Soviet collapse and to take revenge on Western powers, first and foremost the United States, for the perceived humiliation and misery that followed.

Putin’s favorite philosopher, Ivan Ilyn, whose book Наши задачи (Our Tasks) the Russian president assigned to regional governors to read during the 2014 Christmas break, believed that confrontation with the West is Russia’s fate because of the West’s relentless and perennial desire to destroy the Motherland.